Abstract

In the Netherlands a new concept of health has been introduced by Huber et al. [1]. “Health is the capacity of people to adapt and direct their coping with adversities of life against the background of physical, emotional and social challenges. Being healthy means to be able to adapt to disruptions, show resilience and maintain a balance of refined this balance physically, mentally and socially.” This definition of health has increasingly been adopted in health care and has also entered the Dutch professional profile for nurses [2]. No longer (the concept of) health is looked upon as a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being as it used to be formulated by the WHO in the nineties, implicating then that many people must be classified as ill even where they coped with their disease very well and they themselves would not describe themselves as ill. The new concept of health considers health a positive asset and is therefore sometimes labeled as ‘positive health’.